Proxy Specifications

On a university campus network , there should be more than one proxu server , both for performance and also for redundancy reasons . With today's chea[er and larger disks , powerful proxy servers can be built , with 50GB or more disk space allocated tot he cache . Disk performance is important , therefore the fastest SCSI disks would perform best ( althought an IDE asd cache is beter than none at all ) . RAID or mirroring is not recommended .

It is also recommended that a separate disk be dedicated tot he cache . For example , one disk coulb be for the cache , and a second for the operating system and cache logging . Squid is designed to use as much RAM as it can get , because when data is retrieved from RAM it is much faster than when it comes from the hard disk . For a campus network , RAM memory should be 1GB or more :

• Apart from the memory reqyuired for the operating system adn other applications , squid requioired 10MB of RAM for every 1 gb of disk cache . Therefore , if there is 50GB of disk space allocated to caching . Squid will require 500MB extra memory . 
• The machine would also require 128MB for Linux and 128MB for Xwindows . 
• Another 256 MB should be added for other applications and in order thant everthing can run easily . Nothign in creases a machine's performance as need to use the hard disk . Memory is thousand sof times faster than a hard disk . Modern operating systems keep frequently accessed data in memory if there is enough RAM available . But they use the page file as an extra memory area when they don't have enought RAM .